In Canada we use what is called limit states design and it handles the sudden failure vs gradual failure already. Essentially if you want to use a member or a material that suddenly fails you must design it to fail one tenth as often. In practice engineers go even more overboard because nobody wants blood on their hands and gradual failure greatly decreases the odds of that from happening.

In terms of construction materials in condos failing (glass and piping) I actually put the blame for those two failures on the individual testing companies. Engineers in Canada don't understand statistics properly because most aren't taught materials testing properly in university. But we don't live in a utopia either. It is expected that things will go wrong sometimes and that we'll have to update our building codes to address those shortcomings. My issue with Canada is that we don't have a (or at least I'm not aware of there being a) structured materials testing code.

Sure we'll regulate materials and connections for our main structural elements, but there will always be that last mile where someone will want to do something weird (like build part of the building under railway or if someone over bent some reinforcement bar and you need to authorize them rolling it back) and you're pretty much out on your own once you come to those scenarios. It's doubly unfortunate because most of the engineers that just look things up in tables are basically helpless because they don't remember or use the basics day-to-day. So they end up being extremely conservative - unnecessarily wasting money and material for all of us.